“Kunoichi stepped in late last year and since then PJ and I have been working on our publishing schedule for 2009,” Mark Smylie told CBR News. “As we move forward into 2009, we’re finishing up the ‘Mouse Guard: Winter 1152’ series, which we’ll be collecting it in July; we’ll be finishing up ‘The Killer,’ ‘Okko,’ ‘Secret History,’ and a number of the French titles we’ve been doing in the last year. And we’re continuing with a number of series including ‘Killing Pickman’ and ‘Titanium Rain,’ and ‘Miranda Mercury.’”

Smylie said that Archaia will release hardcover collections of “Awakening,” “The Engineer,” “Some New Kind of Slaughter,” and “Primordia,” even though some of these will not have finished their runs in the single-issue format. “Some New Kind of Slaughter” creators mpMann and A. David Lewis recently released the third and fourth issues of the Diluvian mythology series for free on the internet, but the upcoming Archaia hardcover will be the first time the entire story is available in print.

A few books won’t be back from the hiatus — Jennie Breeden’s THE DEVIL’S PANTIES and Sean Wang’s RUNNERS are both going back to self-publishing. Other individual comics series are going to larger, higher-priced formats to get through Diamond’s new benchmarks.